


Back Doors to the Kingdom

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: A lot of them - Freeform, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, I guess???, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Magical Realism, Metaphors, Psychological Drama, Weirdness, do a lot of people write gardening fics?, in a way? - Freeform, overblown metaphors, weirdass plot shit, why is that a tag that exists on AO3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-27 01:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10799079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: All duct tapes in here. Duct tapes and rubber-bands.[Sam + Gadreel/ mindspace]





	Back Doors to the Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: asunder  
> Challenge: Celebrating Sam at ohsam (for Sam's birthday <3)
> 
>  
> 
> I was writing something else for the ohsam Celebrating Sam challenge, but it was plotty and horror and I couldn't find an ending for it. But then it was May 2 and I wanted to post some fic, and I wrote this (?!) and I don't know what it is, except that the casual mention of Gadreel in the last episode had me like hmmmmm and then a small part of this fic I'd already written long ago and then I just wrote the rest.
> 
> ALSO I DON'T KNOW HOW THIS IS RELATED TO THE PROMPT. I swear it was supposed to be. (I fail at everything)

  **Sam was digging a grave.**

He did it in the dark because the stars and the moon were all blown out. Sam hung a lantern from a pole he’d stuck in the ground, and in its yellow circle of light, his shovel struck the ground again and again. The ground was stiff, waiting for frost to come, though it shouldn’t be this cold in Kansas. Sam looked in and thought of how there were no beetles in there, no worms curling through the disturbed layers of dark soil, and wondered if the soil was dead, sown with enough salt and indifference that nothing might grow there ever again. There was ice in it, and if you buried a boy in here, a boy who wanted to be the first Asian American president of the United States, the ice would keep blood in his heart and his veins until summer brought with it sweet rot and chthonic critters.

He hefted one last clod of dirt from the hole and then threw the shovel down, wiping the dirt from his hands.

“I’m sorry, man,” he said to no one, and scuffed the toes of his sneakers against the ground.

The angel watched him inscrutably. It stood to the side, where it couldn’t bother Sam and Sam couldn’t bother it, dressed in white pants and a dark hoodie, a purple T-shirt showing underneath. Its feet were bare, oddly flat and reminding Sam of a platypus. Its toes curled into the dirt. It didn’t smile or frown, just stood and watched, and the air around it was thin and white, a hapless angel nova of fizzing atoms. It didn’t try and speak to Sam, though Sam thought it probably wanted to.

Sam peeked at its face—stone, like the carvings in Renaissance churches—and then turned away, picking up the lantern, leaving his shovel leaning against the pole and the grave yawning wide open.

The sky was starless, moonless, teethed blue at the edges like something carnivorous.

Inside the bunker, the pot of coffee he’d left on was just boiling over. He poured it into a plain white mug Dean had found when he first took over the kitchen—Sam’s very favorite. He liked to press his thumb against the jagged edge of its chipped handle. His pulse would beat against the ceramic ridges not sharp enough to break his skin, and it felt like something colossal and wonderful, a reminder that he was still alive.

When Sam looked out of the open kitchen door, the angel was still there. A yellow piece of paper fell from the edge of its thumb and into the grave. There was a name on it in Sharpie that Sam couldn’t see because he was too far away.

Shuddering, he took the coffee mug back to the library, wondering who exactly it was that he mourned.

 

 **Sam didn’t remember what had happened** to the lights, exactly, but they went out and never came back. Candlelight drowned itself in pools of colored wax. He fell over all sorts of things in the dark, until he learned to adapt to near blindness. There were no colors, only pools of dim yellow light or the high white whine of the flashlight. Always, the shadows seemed more overpowering, like they were living things dancing just out of his sight.

He thought of yelling at the angel to bring the lights back, but they’d come this far without acknowledging the existence of each other, and he didn’t want a drastic change right now.

In what could, in theory, be called as mornings, Sam worked in the library in the light of a gas-lamp.

He moved through lists like they were old friends, committing them to memory, adding and subtracting, forgetting them all every time he closed his book. He counted hours, tracked his own movements within the bunker, tracked the position of the angel in the garden and compared it to the probable phases of the moon because he was bored. He listed down all the places Dean could have disappeared to, again and again. It didn’t make sense that Dean would leave the Impala parked outside the bunker, and so Sam had searched every room in here first. He’d found two extra bathrooms, one oubliette, and a second library of less savory literature that would no doubt delight his brother. But he never actually found Dean.

 _Sometimes it sings,_ he wrote now, hesitantly. He was making a list of all the things the angel had ever done. _Sometimes it shines. On Christmas, it made it snow._

On Christmas, Sam had built a snow dalek in the dark for a lack of anything better to do. The angel had watched. Later, a wild growth of creepers had taken the dalek down.

 _It makes plants,_ wrote Sam _._ He absently tasted the ink of his pen and found it indescribable. He cut out _plants_ and wrote _flowers;_ then cut that out to write _gardens._

 

**The angel made gardens.**

Mostly at night, when Sam slept and dreamed, it sent out shoots from the ground so that when Sam woke, he would smell bay leaves and roses, coffee plants and ginger flowers, chrysanthemums smuggled secretly under the scent of sassafras. Bright flowers the size of which would trump those big-ass rafflesia sprouted from climbers on the side of the bunker’s outer walls, and Sam vaguely considered borrowing the axe that decorated Dean’s wall, tying a headband over his forehead and chopping them all off like an anti-flora warrior or something, but he also worried that the angel was actually friendly, and that he’d put it off if he pulled such a stunt.

Still, he’d have to do something. The front door was nearly inaccessible with vegetation, and if he let this carry on, he’d soon be prisoner in the lightless Garden of Eden.

The wheezing ENIAC in the downstairs computer room kept spitting out cryptic messages about herbicides Sam should try, recipes for scorching roots, for uprooting them, for uprooting angels, for uprooting lies. He ignored them all and told himself that this place was safe. Nothing could get him in here, not unless he let it in himself. Even Dean didn’t have the key.

And Sam wasn’t stupid.

He’d never let anything in knowingly.

 

 **Sometimes, Sam dreamed** that Dean was trying to tell him something.

In the dream, they were pressed up close against each other, out there in that garden. Like a ritual of intense secrecy, Dean pressed his fingers into Sam’s. There was dirt on his fingers, like he’d been planting gardens, or angels.

Dean’s hand came up to rest against Sam’s heart, heavy and hot. Sam put his own hand on top of it and could feel his heart beat, rhythmic and even, everything that was right and ordinary with this world.

Dean smiled and pressed a finger to his lips, like _sshh, this is a secret, you can’t tell anyone else._ Like all the times when they were young, stupid kids who did stupid things, and Dean would push him against a wall or close together inside a cupboard, hiding Sam’s giggles under his palm, hiding his own smile, saying _sshh, Sammy, our secret, our secret, okay?_

“Yeah, sure,” Sam said, quiet and puzzled.

Sunlight threw sashes over Dean’s face as he moved his hand again, a bit to the right. Sam moved with him and felt a second heart, beating alongside his own.

“Dean—” he muttered.

“It’s all fine.” said Dean. “Sshh, it’s a secret.”

 

 **In the morning _,_ Sam made his cornflakes** and then went back out into the garden.  The angel was sitting amidst a group of enormous, loathsome white flowers, like a dot on a peace flag. Sam stood there for a while, watching, the fuzzy beam of his flashlight trained right on the angel’s face.

He asked, “Do you know where my brother is?”

The angel just looked at him. It was making patterns in the earth with a stick, and Sam felt an odd surge of frustration. He threw up his hands and decided he’d have a better chance of getting Crowley to talk, stormed back into the bunker and down into the basement before he lost his way and ended up in the garden again.

The garden had doubled in radius. There were vines creeping into the walls now, old stone crumbling under the onslaught. They curled around the tables in the library, and held his books shut.

“I’d like to wake up now,” Sam told the angel.

It cocked its head, finch-like.

“You’re not even supposed to see me,” it said. Its voice was a liquid warble, like birdsong. It was what angels sounded like, when they weren’t pretending to look or sound human. Sam already knew that.  “Can’t you pretend? It’ll only be for a while.”

Sam shook his head. If you let them, angels would get in your brain and twist reality. They were a virus, capable of erasing you like a Magic Marker slate, overwriting you. And how could Sam _not_ see the angel? He was too familiar with them traipsing through his head.

“What’s your name?”

The angel smiled. “Nothing as bad as the one you’re thinking about.”

“Why are you—?” Sam waved vaguely at the garden, and the angel made another pattern on the ground.

“Gardens are the only things I’ve known, for so long.”

It curled up in the garden and went about pretending Sam didn’t exist.

 

 **“There’s a case up in Fort Worth** ,” Dean said over the phone the next day. “Cas put me on it. Ghouls, Sammy. As crazy as they come.”

“Okay,” said Sam. He’d just dropped the coffee mug, because he’d realized he couldn’t see the angel anymore. He pushed his flashlight right up against the glass. The beam cut over dull plants and duller flowers, but couldn’t find anything living. Sam was standing on tiptoes, peering out through the high kitchen window at the garden, but he couldn’t see it at all. What if it had gotten inside the bunker?

“They’re eating cheerleaders.”

“Who?”

Dean made a huffing noise. “The ghouls. They’re eating cheerleaders.”

“Only cheerleaders?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. That’s weird.”

“Yeah, so. Give me a theory, nerd-boy.”

Sam was distracted. “I’ll—um. I’ll get back to you.”

“Everything’s all right there,” Dean interrupted, brightly. “Don’t freak yourself out. It’s just the Trials. Messing with your head—”

“Hey, why didn’t you take the car?”

Dean didn’t miss a beat. “Oh. Thought you might need it.”

Sam hung up, something gone wrong with his heart, beating too fast. It felt like talking to someone’s idea of Dean, like a Dean leached off color, rubbed clean of raw edges and all the inanities that he held onto, like mental footholds on cliffs that only got steeper. Only Dean could really be Dean. Heck, Sam knew him better than anyone, and even he wouldn’t get him right.

Sam had to climb out through a window to get out into the garden. He hollered for the angel, but it didn’t answer him. All its flowers were turning to steel, inflexible and sharp. Where Sam had dug the empty grave stood a towering tree of twisted black metal.

Sam yelled again, and his voice hit metal, fizzled out.

He didn’t know the angel’s name. Names didn’t mean much, but they made things better. He got out his knife and tried to cut through the alien growth, but that was about as useful as an empty gun.

He looked back at the door he’d come through, blissfully empty of vines or flowers, and wondered when the angel would get to it.

 

 **Later that day, the angel was still missing,** and Sam pushed some clothes into a duffel, threw in his guns and Ruby’s old knife, his cell-phone and Dad’s journal. He grabbed the car keys, though the weight of them felt strange in his hand. He held the flashlight between his teeth as he pushed the door open, relieved that he’d used an Old Milwaukee can to keep it wedged open. A couple of vines fell off the door and lay writhing on the floor.

Sam looked around for the angel once. Then he ran.

The brambles tore at his skin. They were ice-cold, and each of them seemed to possess an intelligence of its own, trying to trip him up, to push him down. His blood was indecently bright amidst their dull silver.

It didn’t matter; he’d known worse.

Metal leaves fell like razorblades, like a flurry. He could see nothing in front of him but more metal, more plants like a mockery of life, a mockery of even death. His cell-phone was trilling in his bag, playing the tune that meant Dean was on the other side.

Or maybe just an idea of Dean, a ghost of him, expectant and following some preset algorithm.

Where was the real Dean then? For that matter, where was _he,_ where exactly was Sam?

Sam saw images like daguerreotype stills—a lighted bunker, Dean, Kevin, Metatron. They twisted and flashed and disappeared into the dark like novae, dreams within dreams.

Whose dream was this?

Everything blurred into movement and confusion. He was blind, slamming against things. The sky was empty and awful, black like it didn’t even hold a memory of light. The silence was deafening. The metal forest grew and multiplied around Sam, tore at him. He cursed, stumbled, pushed through whipping branches and caught his foot on a creeper.

He went down _hard,_ the ground cold and compact from winter and knocking the breath out of him.

“Sam,” said the angel. Why didn’t Sam have an angel-blade? Where did it go? A cradle of mist rose to swallow his thoughts and he stilled for a moment, hurt and bleeding, looking up at it.

“I mean well,” the angel said. It sat down next to him, and Sam watched it, tasting copper in his mouth. It put out a hand and Sam caught it, held tight in a bruising grip, and wouldn’t let it come near his head. “You need me; I’m not here to hurt you.”

The angel was too big, too bright to look at.

A bolt of pain splintered up Sam’s spine, lodged in the spaces beneath his skin. He scrambled to understand, though clarity was strange and scary. He fought to keep the angel from touching him, and it hissed, said “ _Look_ at yourself _. Stop fighting me._ You need me. _”_

Without this angel, Sam had spidered fingers and atrophied muscles. This was a stripped down Sam, spare like lines of blank verse. He struggled. It held him till he stopped, then smiled sadly.

When it stood, bits of yellow paper fell from its pockets like rain.

They were full of names of people who were dead.

 

 **Back in the Bunker,** the angel was the only thing keeping the cold from him.

It knelt above him, knees on either side of his body. He couldn’t get away from it.

“You need me,” it said. It placed a hand on his neck, trying to find a pulse point. Sam tried to raise himself up, but the angel prevented him. His pillow walled up on either side of his head. It was a little hard to breathe.

“You need me,” said the angel again, like it was trying to convince itself. It smelled like leaves and rain, so strong that it burned his eyes. “You and I, we’re not so different.”

The angel had opened a door it shouldn’t have opened, and let something in.

Sam had opened a door he shouldn’t have opened, and let something out.

The careful symmetry of it was interesting.         

The angel’s hands were very strong. Its fingers were wound around Sam’s neck. If it wanted, it could easily break his skin, rip his throat out. If it was Lucifer, he’d have done just that.

Before the wheel began to spin, crushing through God’s original plans, this angel had stood at the gates, pleasant and incomprehensible like most angels. Beyond the gates it always looked green—emerald and chartreuse and loden and jade, dappled with gold, light pure and honeyed and heavy. It wasn’t a place a lot of angels visited. There was more to attend to then, at the near beginning of time: a planet to cradle, ranks and roles, magnificent hierarchies. Things moved and spun and levers were set in place, and always something to report, something to learn, something to manufacture.

Now he gardens just for Sam. _All duct tapes in here. Duct tapes and rubber-bands._

The thought was a burn, a sliver of heat nestled at the top of his spine, and Sam suddenly itched for steel to pare himself open with, to understand, even as he told himself _wrong,_ _wrong—_ everything he was was always wrong—backing away from that feeling until he couldn’t breathe.

“Where’s Dean?” he asks the angel, and it mumbles something—ghouls and cheerleaders—and something’s wrong, something’s _off_ …

 _It’s stuck_ , Sam realized. The angel, it was stuck to him.

He could feel it, a separate entity, but it had grown vines. Into him. And the vines twisted: through his blood, through his skin, his marrow. Sam struggled, trying to pull it apart, but it was just like pulling apart his own skin, and the _vines_ , they were everywhere, sprouting through his heart, his mouth, his eyes.

They were joined and nothing could tear them asunder.

 _You need me,_ said the vines.

 _We’re not so different,_ said the vines.

 _It’s a secret,_ said the vines, _ssshh, don’t tell yourself the secret._

 _My vines, my grace, are your duct tape and rubber bands,_ said the vines, _make yourself a structure you can live inside._

He’d had practice, with the Devil. Practice making structures within himself, within which to live. The remaining space was very small. Maybe he wouldn’t fit. He hoped he wouldn’t.

Maybe then Dean would notice.

 

 **He must have fit.** In the morning, there was Dean on the phone again. _Ghouls and cheerleaders_.

And then Crowley, all of a sudden: “Poughkeepsie,” like a spell word. An expelling. The angel peeled away from him. Became another; standing across the room, looking deceptively like a person.

“Get out of my head,” said Sam.

The angel was still kind in the end. It left him something to live in. Small and blue; a vineyard of good intention.

 

**“Remember Gadreel?”**

Years later.

Sam’s running on more than two days of no sleep (remember Lucifer?), and it’s while searching for lore on the Nephilim that he sees it: an illustration, tightly squeezed into a corner of the old book. A man and a woman, naked—must be Adam and Eve. A serpent, coiled above them like a quote mark, the beginning of the human dialogue. Below, the forbidden fruit: a quince, as attested by Castiel. And below that, coiling and whispering: vines.

 _Make yourself a structure you can live inside_.

Was that what the nephilim was doing? Did it know the angel from the human, or was there too less space for the human amongst the vines?

He asked Dean, “Remember Gadreel?,” thinking for a moment in his sleep deprivation that Dean would say, yeah, yeah, and what of the ghouls? Of the cheerleaders? _Can you keep a secret, Sam?_ And then all the vines would twist up, and pull him down order, and there would be no more space for him. No more space to breathe. Him and the angel, twisted together the way the nephilim was, or worse. Nothing would tear them asunder _._

Instead, Dean rubbed a hand over his face, bleary. “The psycho angel who took your body for a test-drive? Yeah—what about him?”

Sam sat up straighter. Took up some space. Breathed deep, letting the garden recede.

“All right,” he said. “Well, there was this, uh, there was this spell…”

 

 


End file.
